George Gilder talks tech at World News Daily

Last month, World News Daily did a three-part interview with George Gilder on the publication of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, which unpacks some of the book’s main ideas:

In 1981, his bestselling “Wealth and Poverty” provided a blueprint for the economic revolution led by Ronald Reagan, who cited him more than any other living author. In the 1994 version of his book “Life After Television,” he predicted the digital world in which we now live and the invention of the smartphone that now dominates daily life. And long before the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Apple founder Steve Jobs read “Life After Television” and passed it on to his colleagues.

…

Gilder affirmed that the premise of “Life After Google” reflects, in part, his co-founding of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which in addition to being an economic think tank is known as the chief promoter of the theory of intelligent design.

He affirmed that if carried out to its logical conclusion, Google’s future is “dystopian to the extent that they eclipse the creativity of human beings and imagine that essentially their new machines make humans obsolete.”

George Gilder, the author of the new book “Life After Google” that predicts the downfall of “Big Data,” warned in an interview with WND that there is a cost to everything.

Ultimately, for consumers, the biggest cost may simply be Google’s domination of the market.

Gilder noted that Google co-founder Sergey Brin asked a crucial question early in the company’s history: “How does the strategy change if the price is zero?”

The answer turned out to be, Gilder writes in his book, “We win the entire market.”

“Google uses its free strategy to ensure a monopoly,” Gilder told WND. “It’s giving away all these valuable and attractive goods and services to which people gladly yield their data.” Art Moore, “Why Google’s ‘Free Stuff’ Isn’t Free” at World News Daily

Art Moore

Note: In connection with “free stuff,” see: Google is collecting data on schoolkids. Some say it’s okay because the firm supplies a lot of free software and hardware to schools.

Part Three: “An efflorescence of human creativity in the image of the creator”

In “Life After Google,” George Gilder contends the age of the “Big Data” tech giants and their centralized, top-down hierarchical world is about to end, largely because their “neo-Marxist, deterministic” worldview is “fundamentally flawed.”

But what will the digital world look like “after Google”? …

“The Google dream is a supermind in the sky that knows everything,” Gilder told WND. “My dream is to distribute information as human minds are distributed.”

Gilder explained that the capabilities of the human mind, as “the ultimate thinking organism,” are distributed among people all over the world.

“So an economy works best if power is distributed in accord with the distribution of human minds,” said Gilder.

Mind Matters features original news and analysis at the intersection of artificial and natural intelligence. Through articles and podcasts, it explores issues, challenges, and controversies relating to human and artificial intelligence from a perspective that values the unique capabilities of human beings. Mind Matters is published by the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.